Excursions

I let the product announcements from Apple distill into a list of stuff I want, not I wish I had. Apple delivered what I wanted - a new MacBook Air. My 10 years old MBP is crying for an update. iPad Pro is nice, but not for me. Yet. Mac mini is good, will need eventually.

I think may be Apple now need to announce a USB-C to lightning dongle too - for using iPad with iPhone headphones? Or did they already announce that? This dongle mayhem is crazy! 🤔

I do not like these new fonts that Apple is using on slides to announce specs. They aren’t legible at least on the stream. Not sure what @gruber thinks about these - don’t think they have ever used them before. Reminds me of Comic Sans. Shudder #AppleEvent

Mac mini lives. Or is it that it is reborn? Whatever the case, it makes Apple put a lot of push behind it. And thankfully they didn’t go for something cute. Keep it focused at what it is good at. #AppleEvent 👍🏽

Retweets prey on users’ worst instincts. They delude Twitter users into thinking that they’re contributing to thoughtful discourse by endlessly amplifying other people’s points—the digital equivalent of shouting “yeah, what they said” in the midst of an argument. And because Twitter doesn’t allow for editing tweets, information that goes viral via retweets is also more likely to be false or exaggerated. According to MIT research published in the journal Science, Twitter users retweet fake news almost twice as much as real news. Other Twitter users, desperate for validation, endlessly retweet their own tweets, spamming followers with duplicate information.

This is exactly the reason Twitter needs to eliminate retweet feature first — a lot before their proposed killing of the like button. It doesn’t matter how valuable the retweet option is as a signal to Twitter’s algorithm. It has for long been exploited to make it a hostile platform for every voice that should matter. And it needs to disappear first.

I wish I understood the compression and streaming of audio better to understand why some form of audio (for example, episodes of a podcast) sound choppy over Bluetooth and others don’t. I am sure @marcoarment could go on and on explaining the reasons, but this just baffles me.

I have observed significant reduction in the time for the posts to appear on the Micro.blog timeline. Hope this isn’t an anomaly and @manton has put some fixes around this. If so, looks like they are working 👍🏽

Less than 24-hours away from the Apple event and we still haven’t seen any credible hardware leaks of actual devices. All we have is hearsay mock-ups. Either Apple’s cracked the secret to keep the supply chain silent or it’s going to be bumpy few week full of brickbats for them.

Why haven’t audiobooks gone more mainstream yet? After so many years of existence, Audible remains the only credible global player. Plus the plans/costs have hardly changed. It’s a vicious circle at this point - it’s too costly for larger adoption and so remains a niche market.

This thread on Quora captures some of the best stories from real people meeting Steve Jobs — some wonderful memories.

You don’t often get close to people like the Jobs, much less in a ridiculous situation like this, where you realize that they are just really good people.